‘Marsales’ has fallen off the anglo map

Every time I hear the name of France’s second-largest city, I think of my late friend Joan. I met her in the early 1980s when I was a young Canadian writer in England and she was an elderly widow living in a thatched cottage beside a village green. Long-limbed and sharp-nosed, she looked like an older version of Virginia Woolf. Joan loved art, history and nature – her walls were filled with Victorian paintings, and every time she went for a walk down the narrow country lanes, she would carry a bag in which to deposit stray pieces of litter. It was a privilege to know her.

But we all have our blind spots. Joan’s began at the English Channel. She didn’t see why England had so many “foreigners” in it (Canadians were not the kind she meant), and she objected to the way in which “perfectly good names” were now being pronounced differently than in her youth. Marseille, for instance. It annoyed Joan that whenever she heard the name on TV or radio, the announcer said “Marsay.” To her mind, the proper English pronunciation was “Marsales.”

I thought about Joan as I read your replies to my last column, about place names and personal identities. Eiran Harris, for example, politely but firmly stated that my column “failed to provide the correct use of foreign terminology by anglophones. ... When proper English is spoken, it should be restricted to English terminology. That is why ‘Paree’ is Paris, Moskva is Moscow, and Québécois should be Quebecker, pronounced ‘Kweebeker.’ Are my assumptions faulty?”

Not altogether. But the nature of “English terminology” changes over time, which is why most people would now find it distinctly odd to hear mention of “Marsales.” Except when eating duck in Chinese restaurants, we have managed to switch from Peking to Beijing; and few Canadians call the Italian city of Livorno by its traditional English name, Leghorn. Only readers of Graham Greene’s early novel Stamboul Train now remember the old name for Istanbul. I suspect that, much to Eiran Harris’s dismay, “Kweebeker” may encounter the same fate as Stamboul.

Among other responses, Graham Weeks observed that “Quebecians” is exactly “what Paul McCartney called us when he was being interviewed on CBC Radio prior to his concert on the Plains of Abraham.” Gerry Ahronheim noted that for New Zealanders, “Kiwi” is almost standard usage. (“However, an adjectival form – ‘Kiwian’? – escapes me.”) And Bruno Paul Stenson pointed out that “When referring to government-sponsored pavilions at Expo 67 I never use the adjectival form, but I figure I have a good excuse: Expo also featured pavilions with corporate sponsors that resist the adjectival form. While I could refer to the Canadian pavilion or the Indian pavilion, I would then feel compelled to refer to the Kodakian pavilion or the Pulparian and Paperian pavilion.” Ah, the subtle power of consistency.

Driving through Toronto recently, I heard constant references on traffic reports to the “DVP.” It took a while for me to realize these initials were shorthand for the Don Valley Parkway. The three long, rhyming syllables of DVP take longer to pronounce than the words “Don Valley.” So why use the abbreviated form, which baffles visitors to the city? I suppose because it sounds more high-tech, more the type of highway that the owner of an “LS 600h L” or an “F-150 SVT” dreams of speeding along. Imagine driving one of those acronymic vehicles and hearing an announcer say, “The part of the GTA where you need your GPS is where the 404 becomes the DVP south of the 401.”

Is this English? Certainly. It’s not a dialect I enjoy – but the language, to use a metaphor my friend Joan would have appreciated, is not a walled garden; it’s a wilderness, disorderly and lush. Among the current winners in the Darwinian struggle to survive are initialisms like DVP, GTA (Greater Toronto Area) and GPS (global positioning system). The latest to surge into public consciousness is TPP – not thiamine pyrophosphate or total penalty points, but rather the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an attempt to create a free-trade zone in countries around the Pacific Rim, including Canada.

The FTA was superseded by NAFTA. Maybe NAFTA will be superseded by the TPP. You read it here first; now go and take a Valium. I mean, a BZD.

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